To learn more about the Ecommerce Economic Defense Initiative, visit EcommerceDefense.com

Other than the fact that Mickey Mouse is always fun, there’s another good reason to talk about Jerry Leigh’s new Volusion store: it’s not a retail outlet.  It’s

Read More]]> Jerry Leigh is one of the largest producers of licensed souvenirs & apparel in the United States.  Based in Orlando, Florida, they’re well positioned to serve their target market: tourist destinations.  That’s right – they make the things that cause your suitcase to be dramatically overstuffed on the way home from your vacation.  The next time you’re jumping up and down on your Samsonite in an effort to squeeze in that Donald Duck water bottle, you can thank Jerry Leigh.

Other than the fact that Mickey Mouse is always fun, there’s another good reason to talk about Jerry Leigh’s new Volusion store: it’s not a retail outlet.  It’s a wholesale site that can only be utilized by preregistered clients.  That’s not necessarily earth-shattering news (that a wholesaler would use Volusion to better serve their clients) but it’s worth pointing out when it happens simply because there are far too many wholesalers out in the world that have failed to recognize what a useful tool an ecommerce site can be.  There are wholesalers out there (you know who you are) who still take orders over the phone while working from a printed catalog.  We know the old ways can be comforting, but come on!  It’s the 21st century for crying out loud!  Put down the invoice pad and pick up your mouse!*

*Don’t actually “pick up” the mouse or it won’t work.  We’d like to assume that you already knew that, but if you’re a wholesaler without an ecommerce site, there’s a chance that the operational subtleties of the personal computer are entirely baffling to you.

We own and operate The Red Hat Society Store.  That gives us a lot of first-person insight into the needs of the average Volusion retailer.  That insight led us to build AutoResponderMax – the email marketing tool for Volusion.  We built it to meet a lot of the communication needs

Read More]]> This is an actual, unretouched screen shot from our boss’s iPhone showing that as yesterday, The Red Hat Society’s online store had made $1,118 in April by using AutoResponderMax – that’s a 2,281% ROI.   If you haven’t already clicked over to AutoResponderMax to start your free trial, then allow us to give you all the details…

We own and operate The Red Hat Society Store.  That gives us a lot of first-person insight into the needs of the average Volusion retailer.  That insight led us to build AutoResponderMax – the email marketing tool for Volusion.  We built it to meet a lot of the communication needs we have with our own online store.  The screen shot here proves that we were pretty successful.

What you see here is a shot of the AutoResponderMax Dashboard app for iPhone.  (Which is totally free, by the way.)  It shows April’s usage data.  Stated simply, ARMax sent 2,154 event-triggered (and personalized) emails to Red Hat customers.  A remarkable 70% were opened and 41% of those resulted in click throughs.  Those are all really good numbers if your only goal is to build your relationship with your customers.  If, on the other hand, you’d also like to make money, the real number to look at is this month’s revenue – $1,118.  That’s over a thousand dollars of revenue that is directly related to emails sent by AutoResponderMax.  The Red Hat Society Store is on the Plus Plan (the most popular level) which means that thousand dollars cost us exactly $49 – bringing us back to that incredible 2,281% ROI – except that it isn’t incredible.  It’s credible – and provable.

We have trouble talking about AutoResponderMax sometimes because basically we always just want to say, “Try it, for crying out loud!  The first 30 days are free and it’s awesome and it totally pays for itself over and over and it’s so easy and what are you waiting for?  DO IT, DO IT, DO IT!“  Now, with this photographic proof that it works so dramatically well, we’re almost overwhelmed with the desire to reach out of the screen, grab your mouse and sign you up ourselves.  Of course, that would be rude, so we’ll just strongly suggest that if you’re a Volusion retailer and you don’t have AutoResponderMax, you’re almost certainly leaving money on the table and that’s just crazy.  Go sign up right now!

… but maybe you don’t think you need custom development

Read More]]> Brand Labs is about a lot of things, but our real bread & butter is custom ecommerce development.  Yes, we design Volusion sites.  Yes, we build ecommerce apps.  We do a lot of things for a lot of online merchants, but custom development is the one thing we do that gives our clients an undeniable edge.  We say “undeniable” because when your store has something that your competitors don’t have, you’re ahead of the game before the shoppers even arrive.  By definition, you’re more prepared to serve their needs.  You’re more prepared to earn their trust.  You’re more prepared to win.

… but maybe you don’t think you need custom development on your site.  After all, Volusion does a good job of providing a feature-rich platform.  Why not just do what you can with what you’ve got?  Well, off the top of our heads, we can think of ten reasons…

1. You’re unique.

   No matter what Volusion introduces, they don’t know you personally.  They don’t know the exact thing that you need to express your individuality properly.  They don’t know your particular value proposition.  That’s not a failing on their part, it’s simply a fact.  You are uniquely qualified to identify your store’s specific needs and to act on those needs.

2. You’re not doing everything you can with your Volusion store.

   You know that smart phone in your pocket?  You’re currently using about 4% of its total capabilities (we may have just made that figure up).  That phone can do amazing things and you’re using it primarily to text people that you’re running late.  Your Volusion store is like that.  It can do amazing things that you’re currently not using.  Are you using the Deal of the Day function?  Is your mobile store set up properly?  Are you doing everything that Volusion allows you to do out of the box?  Probably not.  So, if we may continue to use the smart phone comparison: even though your phone is capable of doing a lot of things that you aren’t using, you still paid extra to download Angry Birds because it was a specific need that you were able to identify and address (i.e. your deep need to throw birds at pigs).  Custom development is like that.  You should definitely try to use all of the great functionality that’s built right in to Volusion, but just because you’re not, that doesn’t mean that you can’t add some features of your own.  Custom development for your Volusion store is just like apps for your iPhone.

3. You’ve got ideas.

   Just because we’re ecommerce experts (and Volusion is filled with ecommerce experts), that doesn’t mean that we (or they) have thought up every single thing than could ever possibly be thunk.  You have insight.  You have a plan.  You know things about your business that we don’t, but we definitely know how to act on your ideas.  Don’t let your ideas die in your head.

4. You’re probably right.

   You know that one thing that you think you know better than anyone else?  That one annoying thing that seems so simple and would make your life as an ecommerce merchant so much easier?  Or make your store more successful?  You’re probably right. Why not fix it instead of just letting it drive you insane?

   Read the rest of the list after the jump…

5. Your store needs it.

   The biggest misconception about custom development is that it’s strictly for huge businesses.  After all, if you could have built a store from scratch, you would have, right?  Not necessarily.  A lot of huge businesses (including some of our clients) have chosen Volusion as a base to build on, essentially creating custom stores that utilize Volusion as a robust content management system.  On the other hand, we’ve also worked with tiny mom & pop shops that want to use Volusion for all it’s worth, but also want to distinguish themselves by taking that extra little step to serve their customers better than their competition.  Custom development is for everyone.

6. Your competition is doing it.

   The ecommerce marketplace is completely saturated.  No matter what business you’re in – no matter how unique your personal business model is – you have competition.  In some cases it’s just sort of general, big-box competition (like Amazon & Target.com) but it’s far more likely that there’s someone out there doing nearly the same exact thing you are.  Ecommerce is becoming a game of degrees, so you have to exercise every advantage you can.  If you don’t have an advantage, make one.  If you can’t figure out how, find someone who can.  Don’t lose the game by not playing it.

7. You want it.

   Having something that you can call your own is empowering.  There’s just something about personal ownership that satisfies in a way that’s difficult to describe without sounding shallow, but you know that if your website did that ONE thing that you really wish it would, you’d feel better.  You’d show it off.  You’d explain it to people who didn’t understand it.  You’d go out of your way to find people who did understand it so that they’d be properly impressed when they saw it.  From a business standpoint, this is the absolute worst reason to engage in custom development on this entire list, but you also know that it’s true.  The website that you’re currently on is loaded with good information and useful features, but one of our very favorite things about it is that little rollover banner at the bottom of the page that lets you know with very little effort that we’re Google Analytics and AdWords Certified.  It’s so simple, but it does what it needs to do very gracefully and it’s one of the first things we want to show people when we’re showing off the site.  Custom development doesn’t need to be big to be satisfying.  It just need to fill a need and be ever so slightly awesome.

8. You’re losing sales.

   Chances are that if you’ve ever had an idea about improving the service on your store, it’s been as a reaction to a client need (or at least to a perceived client need).  So you’ve recognized something that your clients expect or want from you.  That’s an important step, but if you don’t act on it, you may as well close up shop and send your clients off to find your replacement, because that’s just how fickle the shopping public has become.  It’s not even that they’re fickle, actually.  It’s just that it’s become incredibly easy to shop elsewhere.  In the olden days, if you were shopping in a store and you reached some sort of hurdle, you’d probably just overcome it and finish your purchase because backing out would require physically leaving the store, locating an appropriate alternative using the meager resources available to assist your search, physically go to the new store and hope that the shopping experience was better.  It used to be a pain in the butt to switch stores mid-purchase.  Now it’s a click away.  One, single speed bump and the customer is gone.  They won’t even think about it.  They’ll just leave and never return.  If you know where those speed bumps are and you’re not removing them, you should probably just put up a page full of links to your competition because it will be more useful to them than your store is.  (Man, that sounded harsh, but it’s a cruel world and we wouldn’t be doing you any favors by coddling you – but still we feel bad about it.)

9. Your favorite stores do it.

   There’s a darn good chance that the online stores that you visit frequently are the ones that are doing everything right.  You’re in the business, so you’re savvy.  You can recognize the difference between a standard template and one that was uniquely crafted with care, knowledge and understanding.  There are people out there who aren’t quite as savvy about the ins and outs of ecommerce – we call them customers. They don’t necessarily recognize the tiny minutia of thoughtful template design, they just know that a well-built one inspires confidence and brand loyalty.  When they find a unique feature that’s intended to ease the transaction process, they respond by transacting.  They respond by returning.  They respond by adding that store to their mental list of personal favorites – just like you do.

10. You will do it eventually.

    If you’re clever and lucky enough to stay in business for years at a time, you’ll develop a better understanding of your customers’ needs and desires.  That knowledge is meaningless unless you act on it.  We can guarantee you (based on years of experience with hundreds of clients) that those needs will involve custom development.  It’s simply inevitable.  It’s a product of being smart about your business.  You will simply know what needs to be done and you will know that in order to be where you want to be, you will have to make that thing (or things) happen.  You’re going to do it eventually and if you’ve been in business for a while already, there’s a really good chance that “eventually” is actually “now.”

For all of these reasons and oh so many more, you should consider your Volusion store’s custom development needs today.  After all, the best time to fix a problem is before it becomes a problem.  Wait!  That’s an 11th reason!  And it’s a really good point!  Proactive is better than reactive!  Dang it.  We are not going to rewrite this article.  Just trust us.  There’s a ton of reasons to get your custom dev on.  We even have a handy list of case study examples of custom Volusion programming that we’ve done for our clients.  We guarantee that if you click through and read the page, you’ll have at least one Ah-Ha Moment.

… wait!  That page has 13 more reasons.  Dang it!  Okay.  Let’s just all pretend that this article is called 24 Reasons Your Volusion Store Needs Custom Development.  Agreed?

Read More]]> While searching the Internet this morning for important new pictures of baby sloths, we stumbled on the video we’ve posted below.  Before you play it, we’d like to warn you about a few things.  First, it’s eleven minutes long.  Second, you’re going to want to watch all of it.  Finally, unless your heart is a tiny, ice-cold cinder, you’re going to cry.  We’re misting up just thinking about it, but that might be because we’re also listening to Sarah McLachlan, so we’re probably thinking about that frigging animal shelter commercial that always drops like a bomb into the middle of whatever lighthearted romp you’re watching on TV and brings your life to a screeching halt while you scrape together all of your change to donate just so you can make all the big-eyed homeless puppies stop crying in HD all up in your grill.

The video below is the opposite of that.  Enjoy.

Okay… now just pull yourself together now so we can talk about this like the totally composed businesspeople we are.  So, that was deeply charming on a lot of levels – the boundless and inspiring enthusiasm of youth, the near-universal love of The Arcade and the way that something so frivolous can bind us all at such a basic level, the unqualified support of a working class father for his son’s passion project, the pride of accomplishment – there’s a lot of real genuine heart-string-plucking going on here.

… but did you notice how no one gave a crap about Caine’s Arcade until a savvy outsider stepped in and started a social media campaign in support of it?  Did you further notice that Caine’s Arcade also benefited from the Holy Grail of viral luck – an appearance on the front page of reddit?  The Internet basically prevented this from being an incredibly sad or possibly even heart-crushingly tragic story.  Let’s talk about how all of this could have played out after the jump…

For the sake of argument, let’s say that Nirvan Mullick had never walked in to Caine’s Arcade.  Let’s say that because fate and reality are often unkind, not one single adult ever acknowledged Caine and his accomplishments.  Let’s say that no one ever cared about Caine’s Arcade except for Caine.  Then what happens?  One of two things…

The good option is that Caine outgrows his obsession as puberty hits and the allure of The Ladies takes over (as it is likely to).  A dust-covered, roughly-hewn cardboard Dave & Busters is far less attractive to teenage girls than one would like to hope, ultimately leaving Caine with only one option – the dumpster.  Caine’s Arcade dies an unceremonious death at the hands of the local sanitation workers and rots – unmourned – beneath an near-immeasurable mound of other people’s cast off dreams and garbage, as Caine goes out into the world, coated in Axe body spray, in pursuit of something that cannot be suitably simulated with corrugated cardboard and packing tape.  The Arcade becomes a nearly-forgotten family story that people only talk about when they’re trying to remember how cute Caine used to be before the light inside of him died.

That, my friends, is the happier option.

Now, let’s imagine that Caine’s lust for The Ladies never overtook his obsession with his paper arcade.  The light inside of him never dies (despite the fact that we’re still speculating that it goes unnoticed).  Let’s say that he just kept building and building – creating a veritable cardboard Neverland that swallows his father’s auto parts store, making it no longer viable as a retail space.  The store loses its customers, perhaps to more convenient online options (here’s where we start to bring it back around to ecommerce) and the business’s failure drives a permanent wedge between Caine and his father, who had always supported Caine in spite of his own self interest.  They cease speaking to each other completely even though they’re both forced to live together in the carboard-stuffed corpse of the former auto parts store.  Caine’s father dies under a skee-ball machine made entirely of refrigerator boxes and Caine appears in an episode of Hoarders that’s so epically tragic that it anchors A&E’s sweeps week programming and gets higher ratings than American Idol’s results show.

But none of that happened.  The Internet saved Caine and his arcade.  Social media saved him.  Virality saved him.  A kind and talented stranger saved him.  Caine is a very lucky young man.  Here’s the problem: you’re not Caine.

You’re like Caine in a lot of ways.  You’ve built your business from nothing.  You taped it together as best you could and it’s filled with your blood, sweat and tears.  You’re ready to serve your customers with your whole heart and if they take you up on it, you’re going to give them the kind of consumer experience that will make them want to come back again and again.  You’re ready to make them love you.  Now all you need is for Nirvan Mullick to stumble on your business and make a beautiful eleven minute movie about you.  Wait… you also need him to believe in you strongly enough to try to organize a small group of people to patronize your business.  Oh, and you also have to be fortunate enough to capture the imagination of one of the most influential and unforgiving audiences on the Internet: Redditors.  The good news is that it happened to Caine and there has never been a more deserving target of that particular set of unlikely conditions.  The bad news is that you’re going to have to be your own Nirvan Mullick and you’re going to have to do it at the same time that you’re busily taping your business together.

Love what you do.  Be good at it.  Both of those things are truly critical, but without an audience, your business is a pile of passion and paper.  Find a way to engage with the wider world.  Find a way to tell your story.  Let your voice be heard.  Social media provides you with a near-infinite range of opportunities to connect with your target customers and you simply cannot afford to ignore that fact.  Of course there’s Facebook.  Of course there’s Vimeo and YouTube.  Of course there’s reddit.  The question is what are you gonna do about it?  What’s going to make your target care about you when they have access to… well… everything?  Answering that question is a challenge, but it’s going to become more and more critical to your business as the world gets simultaneously wider and smaller.  Don’t expect that jaded world to beat a path to the thing that you love.  Reach out, grab them by the heart and tell them why they should love it too.

It’s important to us that you understand that we are not heartless business robots.  We know that Caine’s Arcade is not about commerce.  It’s about passion.  Its about community.  It’s about shameless innocence reflected in the rediscovered innocence of strangers.  We want some of that.  If you happen to be in East LA, please visit Caine’s Arcade for us.  You can find it right here:

BOOM!  Right back to ecommerce!

-

UPDATE: It’s important to our trendspotting ego that you know that even though Caine’s Arcade now has over 100,000 fans on Facebook, When we wrote this article, he had less than 300.  We’re more trendy than approximately 100,000 people.

Deal of the Day is a proven way to engage your regular customers and encourage repeat visits, which is perfect for a site dedicated to a series of movies about returning and returning and returning.

If you aren’t currently using Volusion’s Deal of the Day, you’re missing a great opportunity to build loyalty and move product.  You’re also missing the chance to…

… this

Read More]]> BTTF.net isn’t just the Internet’s leading dealer of Back to the Future-related merchandise, they also happen to be an old Brand Labs customer.  We designed their current site and just recently we created a great new Deal of the Day page using Volusion’s built in functionality.

Deal of the Day is a proven way to engage your regular customers and encourage repeat visits, which is perfect for a site dedicated to a series of movies about returning and returning and returning.

If you aren’t currently using Volusion’s Deal of the Day, you’re missing a great opportunity to build loyalty and move product.  You’re also missing the chance to…

… this is usually the point at which we’d say something clever and quote the movie or something like that, but you know what?  For all of its deep impact on popular culture, Back to the Future is almost entirely devoid of catchphrases except for ones that only make sense in context, so we’ll just end here by saying:

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

See?  It just doesn’t work.  Our apologies.

If you’re looking for a wide variety of ways to prove to the world that you’re not likely to be running for public office any time soon, Old School Tees can hook you up.  Perhaps a sexually suggestive Fred Flintstone shirt will do the trick.  If not, the perhaps a mildly sacrilegious Big Lebowski tee?  Either way, Old School Tees is ready to put something on your chest that’s quite

Read More]]> Ensuring that hipsters and nerds are not walking around topless, frightening the general populace with their pasty white skin and ironic shoulder tattoos, Old School Tees is more of a public service organization than a Volusion store.

If you’re looking for a wide variety of ways to prove to the world that you’re not likely to be running for public office any time soon, Old School Tees can hook you up.  Perhaps a sexually suggestive Fred Flintstone shirt will do the trick.  If not, the perhaps a mildly sacrilegious Big Lebowski tee?  Either way, Old School Tees is ready to put something on your chest that’s quite a bit funnier than the large food stains that usually reside there.

That’s right, Brand Labs customer and Volusion merchant, Neater Feeder was featured on the Today show yesterday in a segment called “Jill$ Steals and Deals.”  In cooperation with NBC, Neater Feeder offered a one-day-only discount resulting in a 5000% increase in daily sales – proving that the camera doesn’t just add 10 pounds, it also adds about a bazillion sales.

In anticipation of the appearance, we created a promotion-specific landing page and Volusion moved Neater Feeder to a dedicated server.  Even with that level of preparation, the site was still nearly crushed by the massive

Read More]]> Neater Feeder is a lot of things – Volusion retailer, award-winning pet product, TV star…

That’s right, Brand Labs customer and Volusion merchant, Neater Feeder was featured on the Today show yesterday in a segment called “Jill$ Steals and Deals.”  In cooperation with NBC, Neater Feeder offered a one-day-only discount resulting in a 5000% increase in daily sales – proving that the camera doesn’t just add 10 pounds, it also adds about a bazillion sales.

In anticipation of the appearance, we created a promotion-specific landing page and Volusion moved Neater Feeder to a dedicated server.  Even with that level of preparation, the site was still nearly crushed by the massive onslaught of customers trying their level best to stuff fistfuls of cash directly into their computers.

Previous to this release, a fundamental problem with web tracking was that it only credited the last link clicked prior to the conversion.  Marketers using the last click methodology were not able to provide a complete view of the customer’s journey through the entire digital buying process.  With Multi-Channel Funnels we’re able to generate reports showing the full path to conversion over a 30 day period. Analyzing a customer’s path across multiple digital channels (organic searches, paid searches,

Read More]]> Six months ago Google released a major improvement to Google Analytics: Multi-Channel Funnels.  With this new feature, we now have deeper insight into conversion attribution and we can improve overall sales tracking.

Previous to this release, a fundamental problem with web tracking was that it only credited the last link clicked prior to the conversion.  Marketers using the last click methodology were not able to provide a complete view of the customer’s journey through the entire digital buying process.  With Multi-Channel Funnels we’re able to generate reports showing the full path to conversion over a 30 day period. Analyzing a customer’s path across multiple digital channels (organic searches, paid searches, referrals, social networks, email etc.) has given Brand Labs a much clearer understanding of how all channels can assist each other in driving a conversion.

Since their release the assisted conversion attribution reports have lived up to the hype with their ability to connect the conversion path dots in ways we previously could only guesstimate. This has resulted in the ability to make more informed business decisions and better allocate resources on behalf of our clients. The best way for me to illustrate the value of these reports without getting anymore technical is to turn the microscope on my own buying behaviors and processes. The info graphic below shows how I jumped from channel to channel on my quest to purchase a Marmot brand jacket. Hopefully the value and insight gained from attributing assists to each channel involved in the conversion is more clearly illustrated in this graphical format.

Purchasing the Perfect Michigan Winter Coat

In preparing for a Michigan winter one must stop just shy of actually stuffing a gaggle of geese into a jacket lining to appropriately battle the bitter, bitter cold. My coat buying process began in late fall just as Old Navy started relentlessly pummeling us with their ridiculous Puffi-Coat Factory tv ad campaign. Although I had little interest in the Old Navy brand, I was mesmerized by the puffification process and knew I had to have something similar. I immediately took to the web in search of a coat whose warmth rivaled that of a polar bears coat and whose fashion stylings could only be compared to that of the Michelin Man or the Stay-Puft Marshmallow. Below is a channel by channel / assist by assist breakdown of the conversion journey taken to find and purchase a Black Marmot Stockholm Jacket.

The Wrap Up

The final Assisted Conversion Path illustration shows the complexity of my journey and clearly illustrates that had a marketer taken the last click methodology of old, they’d have done a disservice to themselves and Moosejaw by giving all of the conversion credit to the last link clicked (Direct). Using the new Multi-Channel Funnels methodology painted a more complete picture and would allow a marketer to attribute value to each of the channels that assisted the final conversion. It was a team effort!

(I’m also pleased to report that despite the mild winter in Southeast Michigan, the coat has proven to be a fantastic investment since the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man has always been my hero.)